Quora Traffic Triples, But It's Still Tiny

Traffic to online Q&A site Quora tripled in January, but it's still a niche site: it currently amounts to 0.00025 percent of weekly Web traffic in the U.S., according to Experian Hitwise.

By way of comparison, Facebook, the most visited site on the Web, accounted for nearly 9% of U.S. user traffic for all of 2010.

Experian credits buzz on popular tech news sites with the hockey stick spike in user growth. The Q&A site lets users post questions and answer them. The site's users vote on which answers are most valuable, so they rise to the top. So far, this has let Quora avoid the spam-filled fate of sites like Yahoo Answers.

It's popular among tech employees -- and journalists -- and high-profile tech figures like Steve Case and Marc Andreessen frequently answer questions there. But as New York Times tech columnist David Pogue pointed out last week, the site fails on non-technical non-business queries like finding nearby summer camps.

Last month, Quora took some steps to make sure that its popularity doesn't ruin it -- for instance, it's creating algorithms to help rank users and their answers automatically.